Letting Cape Honeysuckle flower

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It's November and your Cape Honeysuckle should be flowering like crazy now. And it will continue to flower all through the winter. That is, unless you don't allow it.

Cape Honeysuckle is an easy plant to get to flower. You don't need to do anything. At all. You don't need to fertilize it to get it to flower. All you really have to do is to wait for some cool weather, which we are having now, and leave it alone.

If you insist on trimming your Cape Honeysuckle down into a neat shrub, you will discourage flowering. So, if your neighbor is being "helpful" with a power trimmer, stop them. This is a vining, flowering plant, not a box shrub. If you're a neat gardener, get out your hand trimmers and watch what you are doing. In the photo at left you can see the beginning of a flower. Leave the bud alone. Elsewhere you will see ordinary growth, and you can trim that off to be neat. It's good to be neat. But leave the flowers alone!

Then just sit back and enjoy. Isn't it great living in Arizona?

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